Page 22

Case Three Closed

K rahe wasted no time in taking the proof of Eutropia’s death back to Garvesh. Right next to the door in that back alley, near the cobbles that were stained with Evoy hemolymph, she found a pile of scrap. After taking a closer look, she recognized a few parts. A rack, a mangled burner, a burst-open thaumine tank. Her stomach wrenched when she realized it was none other than Imraal’s food cart, mangled by what was likely an explosion.

Despite her deep and profound sorrow, she mustered the will to enter the building. She knocked on the old lizard’s door and called out, “Open up, it’s me!” He readily opened up upon hearing her voice.

The lock turned, and the door swung open, but Garvesh was nowhere near it.

“Close and lock the door. I’m in the bathroom. Come in, it’s fine.”

“Something happened,” Krahe deadpanned as she did as he asked.

“You saw Imraal’s cart out front. I took it out on the street. Didn’t want to disappoint his customers, y’know. Some overly ambitious assclown just came up and blasted me point-blank with a Red Reaper. Can you believe that?”

There was effort in his voice, strain even, but the way he spoke about being shot with a Red Reaper carried a tone of disbelief and ridicule more than anything. Krahe was somewhat confused, but it wasn’t because of that. It was the aura. Like some giant monster, unable to act in any way befitting its size yet inconceivable in its immensity.

Garvesh was, indeed, in the bathroom. The old lizard turned his eyes up to meet Krahe’s as she walked in. He was sprawled out in the small pool he called a bathtub, leaning on one hand while his other was twisted into a stiff gesture—thumb, index, and ring fingers forming an eye, while the middle and pinkie were held straight. He hovered his hand over his stomach, a thin stream of blue-glowing magic pouring out through the eye to join a large, metallic scale of a blue shade so dark it was nearly black. Slowly, tiny bit by tiny bit, the scale grew. Others around it were also visible, transitioning from solid metallic to ghostly and to nothing. Krahe immediately knew what was happening. Wards. He was repairing his wards.

Across the room, chained up to the radiator, was a gagged man who may have been handsome at some point before the front of his body had been shredded and burned. A baneworm’s bulging tendrils could be seen beneath his skin, and some even dangled out of the cavity of his torn stomach, tangled amongst his intestines.

“I’m not moving until this one is finished, so you may as well speak now,” he remarked, refocusing his eyes on his own stomach. They momentarily flicked upwards at Krahe as he added, “Please tell me you came to tell me Imraal’s killer is dead. I need some good news after this shitshow.”

Krahe gave a slow nod, still processing the scene.

“Yeah. I have her souldregs if you want them.”

“You said she’s dead, so she’s dead. You can show me the dregs later.” He shrugged. A short time passed in heavy silence as Krahe remained captivated by the complex internal pattern of Garvesh’s wards.

“I thought wards were at least partly tied to your attributes.”

“They are. I wouldn’t be able to form one of these from scratch in my state, and I’ve got a couple thin spots in places I won’t tell you. But as long as one of these scales doesn’t break, I can fix it. It’s a bitch and a half, tell you what. The damage this wormy fuck did will be at least a week’s work to repair. Just maintaining my wards is hard enough.”

An aura of pure anger and hatred spilled out of Garvesh as he spoke, doubtlessly fuelled by awareness of the meticulous and strenuous work he had ahead of him. Krahe knew it all too well; for several years, she used a type of armor that, despite its high defensive performance, was no longer being manufactured. Manufacturing replacement graph-fullerene without the original machinery was perhaps among her least favorite memories. The inside of Garvesh’s ward-scales didn’t quite look as complex as a graphene mesh with fullerene balls instead of single carbon atoms, but it probably felt just as complex given that he was rebuilding it by hand. Krahe continued to watch for some time, drawing closer as Garvesh allowed her to observe.

“Feel free to try an’ copy me, so long as you let me know when you fail so I can laugh at you. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen someone try.”

“I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I’ve been using the same ward design far too long,” she admitted. They had worked well enough when she needed them, and with the Liminal Coil, simply not getting hit had become her go-to defensive tactic.

“Think Semzar’s going crazy and trying to have anyone who dealt with me killed?” she asked, assuming the worst.

“No, he’s stupid, but not insane.” Garvesh shook his head. “I know why dumbfuck here shot at me; he spilled his guts the moment I spilled his guts. One of the side effects of my crippled state is that so long as I do not burn Thauma, I come off exactly as weak as I feel. This fool, turns out, was the one who hired the assassin on Semzar’s behalf. He saw me, saw Imraal’s cart, and, puttin’ two and two together, got five. He thought Imraal had somehow survived and faked his death, so he panicked and shot me.”

Garvesh emitted a rumbling, engine-like chuckle.

“He saw a Drasaurian and thought a single juiced up Red Reaper would kill me. Even without wards that wouldn’t be enough, not for me. Ey, you hear me?! Y’forget why yer filthy kind love to steal our bodies so much?!”

The noise didn’t wake the baneworm, but what Garvesh did right after his outburst served that purpose. He gathered spit in his mouth, and spat out a piece of the same bluish metal as his ward-scales, enveloped in a thick layer of mucus. It landed right in the would-be assassin’s eviscerated intestines, and quickly became enveloped in spitting, angry, blue flame. It looked like white phosphorus, just prettier and without the poisonous smoke.

The baneworm’s host awoke. His eyes flashed with panic and tendrils bulged under his skin as he began screaming into his gag.

“Shut up, or the next one is going in your mouth,” Garvesh threatened, gesturing at the burning mass currently eating its way into the prisoner’s guts, somehow going deeper rather than following gravity.

Outright screaming tuned down to sounds of pain, until the worm’s tendrils retracted from that area of his stolen body, and he fell silent. His gaze almost immediately became an analyzing one, darting back and forth, shamelessly looking for an opportunity to escape.

“What do you plan to do with him?” she gestured to the prisoner.

“I’ll turn the body into the church. It should get back to any relatives he might have. The wormy fuck didn’t even bother to change the face, and kept the original contractor ID. As for the worm… I’ll debeak and swallow him whole. You’ve got an acid bath to look forward to, my friend.”

The fear gripping the baneworm’s host seemed to get to be too much, as his tendrils began writhing wildly. The body’s eyes rolled into the back of its head, with tendrils bursting out of their sockets. The worm exploded out of the host’s mouth, trying to jump for Krahe. Before it could reach her, Barzai erupted out of her chest, catching the worm in his beak as he darted across the room. The eidolon proceeded to tear into the worm, seemingly killing it instantly, and continued eating it from there on, piece by piece.

“Sorry. Looks like my pet eldritch monstrosity stole your dinner,” Krahe said, genuinely unsure whether Garvesh would be angry. The old Saurian finally finished repairing the one ward-scale and erupted with guttural laughter.

“You didn’t really think I’d eat that nasty fuck, did you?” He cackled, slapping his thigh. It sounded nearly like a gunshot.

“I’ve eaten worse.” She shrugged. “Was that a total lie, or some niche delicacy?”

“It’s a niche delicacy even among Saurians,” Garvesh confirmed. “Baneworm meat’s nasty and stringy, and you must carefully remove the venom glands without rupturing them. We used to do it as a ritual execution for any baneworms we caught.”

The hatred dripping from each of his words made it abundantly clear how much he reviled baneworms as a whole, not just this particular individual. He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts, sighed, and glanced down at his chest, running his hand over it. The ward-scales revealed themselves beneath his fingers in a truly draconic suit of armor, though many of its scales were chipped or even broken.

“Fuckin’… They’re getting more brittle by the year. Unless you’ve got more to tell me, you should go. I’ll be here for a while.”

Krahe glanced at Barzai, then replied, “I figure I’ll be stuck here for at least fifteen minutes. Got any crab juice?”

Garvesh’s face lit up, and nodding, he gestured vaguely towards his kitchen.

“Yeah, in the fridge. Pour yourself a glass. And bring me the whole jar after that.”

Despite Garvesh’s incident and the resulting tragic death of Imraal’s food cart, things were going quite well. While she was still there, she presented him both Eutropia’s souldregs and her broken voidkey, hoping he might be able to appraise it where her glasses failed. She had attempted to do so herself, but the reading in question was garbled and illegible.

Unfortunately, appraising a broken key's original effects turned out to be far more complex than appraising a functioning one. Audibly pleased with himself, Garvesh explained, “Think about it. Think a rando on the street could look at the pile of scrap out front and tell that it used to be a food cart, let alone the specific kind of burners it had or what kinda food it used to make? It’s… Alright, it’s not actually like that with broken artifacts, but the analogy still works. Takes specialized knowledge or equipment to make sense of it. If you want.”

“No, you don’t need to find someone who can appraise it for me. I’ll let you know if I run out of my own options. You just… fix yourself. You’ll be useless to me if you get whittled down and killed.”

She spoke as if her motivations were entirely selfish, but in truth, she had grown at least enough of an attachment to Garvesh to not want him to die. Krahe, of course, was not self-aware of this fact, nor would she be willing to admit it to herself, let alone to someone else.

Returning to the safehouse, she found it empty. In the absence of anything urgent to do, she spent further time studying Yao’s scroll. Having jumped ahead a few times, she found that the later sections were exceptionally dense and frequently referred back to earlier parts of the text, so she stuck to going through it from the start for now. The parts she had managed to digest so far mostly covered small tips and optimizations for the basic act of drawing a talisman. Rather than cosmic secrets, the scroll’s early parts contained the wisdom of countless hours spent doing a precise, repetitive task. Krahe couldn’t draw a Wandrei Faust with the new brush yet, but she found it to be far more pleasant and better balanced in the hand. It would only take time and practice to get used to it.

The reason she went straight to Yao’s scroll was simply the fact that Yao was on her mind as she left Garvesh to his work. The Talisman Mistress was, after all, the first person who came to mind when it came to appraising the broken key.

Once she had built up a pile of wastepaper, her grip on the brush was noticeably unsteady, and she saw occult symbols when she closed her eyes; Krahe decided it was enough for now. She spent the rest of the day resting and casually reading, occasionally making basically futile attempts to pierce deeper into the dense mass of Yao’s scroll.

The next day, she visited the shrine on Gashward Road as a stop along her way to her house on that street. A young, nervous woman manned the shrine. She couldn’t be more than sixteen, yet Krahe felt a tangible degree of strength from her, both physical and magical. Despite being visibly intimidated by the sight of Krahe, apparently knowing who she was, the shrine maiden moved with trained grace. Her arms had well-defined muscles from what was visible of them.

“Would you happen to be Lady Blackhand?” the girl asked.

“That would be me, yes. I suspect I’ll be visiting your shrine in the future.”

“Ah, my name is Eliana. There are packages here for you, if you could come with me.”

One of these aforementioned packages was heavy and the size of a small suitcase, while the other was about the size of a letter and half a centimeter thick. Both were wrapped in narrow reams of paper and stamped with a sigil with lines of smaller sigils spreading out across the package in a chain-like pattern.

“A pulse of your thauma, please,” Eliana prompted, and Krahe complied. The central seals pulsed with golden light, and the sigil-chains gradually disappeared as if it was burning them away. With all the sigils gone, the packages looked a bit strange, but not particularly churchy, so she just carried them to house No. 94 the normal way.

Opening a box full of cash never got old. The paper wraps disintegrated the moment she tore them off, revealing a dark, wooden surface. Despite being wood, it was just as cold, firm and reflective as solid granite.

A brass insignia of the Seven Spokes stared back at her from the lid, which she lifted. Not the faintest sound issued forth when the lid swung back and knocked against itself. Rows of rings nestled into a tray awaited within. They were set with gems and engraved with glowing runes. For a shining moment, Krahe felt a child-like joy, grinning ear-to-ear. She could swear the rings glowed with purplish light, and a tangible wave of power washed over her. It was stony, impassive, utterly homogenous, and unlike the aura of a person, but the quantity of arcane currency contained within this suitcase was such that it could match the intensity of Casus’ presence when he became Silberblut.

Lifting the tray, she found two more beneath it, decreasing in denomination, with the bottom-most one holding densely packed cylinders of plain bronze bands. Krahe appreciated that she wouldn’t have to bother exchanging the rings. Beneath the bottom-most tray, she found a second, much simpler box, which she took out but left alone for now.

Moving onto the letter, it contained two papers. One was a talisman, and the other was the actual letter. It detailed her payout, specifying a hefty deduction for the suitcase with the options of keeping or returning it. It also mentioned that this payout was for Sorayah and that any further progress in the investigation would merit further compensation, specifically any information pertaining to potential Human Charcoal Cult cells and the recovery of relevant items such as further relics and human charcoal itself. A substantial portion of the payout was, in fact, for Sorayah’s lantern and the human charcoal Krahe brought along.

A second, smaller sum came directly from Razem himself, the reason unexplained beyond the word ‘Bonus.’ The total money in the box fell shy of even half the posted bounty on her head, but it was still in the six digits. If she was being optimistic, even if Sorayah’s case didn’t lead to a greater cult, just the occult material in her home could furnish her with quite a bit of money. How much of that stuff she would turn in depended on whether she found a use for it. The post-script clarified that the talisman was for the ward-breaker; once activated, it would resonate with its twin in the ward-breaker’s possession and call him to its location as pre-arranged by Razem. He would supposedly arrive within an hour if it was anywhere in the city.

As for the smaller box, it contained several paper bags and had another note from Razem on the inside. It was the herbal mixture for the Decoction of Mind’s Dawn, with the note containing directions for brewing and drinking it. Most notable were dosage instructions and for how long it would be good after brewing.

“ You will surely find it to be of use.”

To start with, she wanted to visit Yao again to see if the woman could answer some questions for her. There was the Hexkey, Eutropia’s broken voidkey, as well as human charcoal in general. As for the anthrocite hand, she wanted to keep its existence to herself until she knew its potential value, so she decided to bring up anthrocite if Yao turned out to know about the base substance. She had not mentioned it to Razem out of caution.

There was the matter of her gunmanship, which was acceptable . She didn’t consider the ability to hit a still target at a given distance to be the peak priority, especially since it was so contingent on the gun, the ammo, and the environmental factors. Target tracking and acquisition could be improved beyond just training and real combat, but those improvements would likely be grafts or combat drugs. As she saw it right now, her most pressing shortfalls were to do with getting the right ammo in the chamber at the right time. Alternating-load clips were a start, but awkward, and since the Pattner wasn’t tube-fed, she couldn’t do something like add a second tube magazine and a selector for which one was feeding. Without modifying the gun, the two options that came to mind were manually placing a bullet onto the bolt face while it was cycled forward or pushing the round into the top of the clip, assuming the clip was one bullet short. The second option was a bit problematic due to the fact the clips were held inside the gun only by friction and the same spring that pushed cartridges up through the clip.

There was no choice left but to see for herself. Simply pushing a bullet into a partially empty clip turned out to be the easiest solution. Sliding a bullet into the chamber directly also worked, counter to reason. The clip itself shifted downward slightly when a bullet was chambered, as if the follower spring was pulling it down in response. Krahe brought out the manual and went into the section with the blueprints. The magazine retainer—which was also the clip release lever—was the culprit. It was a single part that gripped a lip on the back of the clip, stopping the follower spring from sending the whole clip out the top of the breech. By disengaging it with one’s thumb, it also allowed a non-empty clip to be ejected. The blueprint noted that it was enchanted to shorten subtly when a bullet was in the chamber specifically for the purpose of letting the user manually load a bullet.

Now that she gave it deeper thought, she remembered reading the manual only so far as it was relevant to maintenance of the weapon and loading the ammo. That left a good one-fifth of the book, which turned out to hold the answers to her questions, including the reason for the gun’s specific design. This late section was absent from the table of contents, and its nonstandard nature was evidenced by the fact it was handwritten and not truly ordered. It stood to reason Pattner had made this one-off edition of the manual for Audun Sorun specifically, or possibly for early adopters in general.

“ The revolving cylinder design, albeit convenient, is limited in capacity. My design can be modified to accommodate alternate and/or expanded magazine designs at any time; I have included example blueprints for two types on the next page. Any craftsman of mediocre skill can manufacture the modification. The same cannot be said for a revolving cylinder design. I shall not speak of contemporary revolvers’ countless issues with structural integrity, sealing, reloading, etc.”

The first modification was an unusual apparatus that would turn the Pattner into a belt-fed pistol, with designs for a disintegrating sheet-metal belt included.

The second one was, effectively, a Mauser C96-style self-contained integral magazine, including a design for a stripper clip. Its design even accounted for the possibility of the user wanting to convert the gun back to en-bloc clips.

These options might be useful in the future but were useless in the now. Krahe went through the rest of the manual just in case, finding a great deal of interesting technical details and various modifications or features that just didn’t make it into the production version for one reason or another. Better sights, a rounded barrel, different grip, different trigger, a wooden stock that doubled as a holster, a rimless cartridge and a bolt to match it. So on and so forth. She spent enough time committing it to memory that she was confident it would float to the surface if it was ever directly relevant.

After dealing with the delivery and stashing most of her money away in the vent duct, she made her way to back Sorayah’s place. The main reason for coming here—breaching her bedroom—turned out to be a bust. The ward-breaker, a Pilgrim Banisher with his horizontal eyes still closed, did his job and left right away like the meat-robot he was for the time being. Sorayah’s bedroom was perfectly normal. Yes, there were occult materials scattered about, but Krahe found nothing that stood out—certainly nothing like the Hexkey or the anthrocite hand.

Disappointed, Krahe continued digging around the house. While reading the various occult texts, she spent time polishing her chamber-loading technique. The fact she needed two hands to do it gnawed at her, because an errant thought had come to her and stuck; a memory of what she had dismissed as a stupid gimmick when she saw it in her past life. A tiny appendage that would pop out of her forearm and shove a round into the chamber or a whole new clip into the mag well. The reason was obvious—she needed her left hand free to cast Wandrei Faust, and to carry out thaumaturgy in general. Eventually, after several hours and several infuriatingly similar manuscripts, it clicked. Why settle for a graft when she could achieve the same effect with thaumaturgy? She could simply conjure a bullet or a whole clip just like she did cigarettes. While any large tendrils were beyond her as far as manifestation from uncharred skin went, something this small was not an issue. Still, it added an Entropy cost to reloading, so simple manual dexterity would remain king. Another option in the arsenal.

Krahe gradually gathered Sorayah’s texts in the writing room, keeping several open in the hopes of coming upon something, anything. Occasionally she would come to the ritual room in the basement to clear her head and look around the scene in the vain hope she would magically find something new.

Mistress Yao came to mind again. How would she even contact the woman?

“It’s not as if she gave me a…”

She conjured the talisman that Yao gave to her. It held a captured trace of Eutropia’s thauma, but it was still one of Yao’s communication talismans, in theory.

“Well, might as well try.”